Re: Re: Spam Bots/E-mail Addys

Hello, On 06/14/2002 12:03 AM, Justin French wrote:

on 14/06/02 12:45 PM, Manuel Lemos (mlemos@acm.org) wrote:

Javascript-less represent less then 0.5% of the users in the World.

I'd be interested in seeing this data proven. I'm not being sarcastic -- I'm genuinely interested.

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse.html/statistics/statistics.html#user-browsers This is a site for geeks/hackers. In a normal site the Javascript less share is even smaller. BTW, it is nothing related but watch how Mozilla/Netscape is discretely swalling back share from IE at a pace of more than 1% a week.

You are guessing. I am sure your address leaked from some other way.

Well, we can debate this forever, but I'm certain. The only other option is if a real person scanned the page and grabbed email address', in the same way a bot did.

That sounds more likely.

It wouldn't take long to write a script that recognised emails in the following formats justin-at-indent.com.au justin_at_indent_dot_com_dot_au justin at indent dot com dot au etc etc... Therefor, it's conceivable that there are spam bots out there which pick up these new "tricks". As soon as something becomes a standard work-around, they'll attempt to find a work-around of their own.

I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying that it is unlikely.

No, the only way to absolutely avoid the problem is to have your site send the message without revealing the address even to the poster. I don't want to do this because the poster may abuse from your site to send hate mail or some other kind of inconvinient mail and your site will be blamed for that. I prefer to leave the less-than-0-dot-5-percent-non-Javascript-browser users fixing the address that had @ replaced.

I agree. And in the case of a user site like yours, and email form isn't really an option. But on a site with 100,000 users, isn't that 500 pissed off users -- and worse still, users with javascript turned off, or archaic browsers, or text to speech user agents, or whatever non-JS reason, they may not be entirely clued-up as to what went wrong.

No, this is an old technique often used in Usenet newsgroups to hack the real address a little to avoid e-mail harvesting. It is not that it will completely prevent Javascript-less browser users to send e-mail. A person that bothers to use Lynx will certainly be smart enough to figure that if the address shows as user-at-domain-dot-com, he needs to edit to turn into user@domain.com .

Then again, it would depend on the target market. I would expect the users of a web dev site would be clued up, but maybe not the visitors to a craft and sewing store.

Yes, those will not use Lynx either nor intentionally disable Javascript! :-) -- Regards, Manuel Lemos